Indigenous activist Larissa Crawford shares powerful video about the 's--- we go through'
"The last time I wore this dress was on stage at the Louvre in Paris in front of 2,500 people."
Larissa Crawford is opening up about facing discrimination.
Earlier this week, the 28-year-old Métis-Jamaican activist took to Instagram to share a video recounting two times she was undermined because of her appearance.
"The last time I wore this dress was on stage at the Louvre in Paris in front of 2,500 people," she began, referencing a red dress was wearing the aforementioned dress again for her more than 32,000 followers.
The Calgary-based activist recalled an "older white woman" trying to "physically" pull her down after she "brought up missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls."
"It was relevant to the topic, I wore a red dress, and I was speaking about why I was wearing that red dress," Crawford explained. "If that's not emblematic of the sh— that we go through and yet we rise, I don't know what is."
Over the past several years, red dresses have become a symbol for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. According to the RCMP, Indigenous women and girls in Canada face greater risks of violence and homicide. tragedy.
Crawford paired her video with a lengthy, detailed caption about another recent incident she faced.
"I wore this dress for my keynote, an older white woman and attendee came up to me and said, 'You don’t look like you belong here… you don’t look like you’re in business,' when I found myself at a business cocktail mixer. She had no information about me apart from how I look," she penned.
She added: "I was continuously interrupted by the other panel members until I told them 'I have something to say and I’m going to say it.'"
"This was disappointing to me," Crawford continued. "I was one of the only youth, one of very few racialized women, and the only self-identified Indigenous woman… I hadn’t seen any of the other speakers at the forum interrupted the way I was."
In September, Crawford shared a video with her Instagram followers of herself in a hospital receiving treatment for pelvic inflammatory disease, determined to break the stigma.
She described the pain as "A serrated knife being dragged along the inside of the uterus. Ovaries are being squeezed to the cusp of bursting. Reliving my most traumatic sexual harm every time I have to give my full medical history."
She explained that due to stigma, women may feel conditioned not to speak out about pelvic pain.
"Believe women and people with uteruses," she added in the caption. "Because of stigma and other barriers, we often don’t share about the pain we experience until it becomes too debilitating to ignore," she wrote.
Let us know what you think by commenting below and tweeting @YahooStyleCA! Follow us on Twitter and Instagram.
